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“... one of whom it could be said that ‘the First World War effectively destroyed his world,’ or Leonard Woolf the only one qualifying for the remark: ‘The Second World War put paid to his hopes for international sanity’? Some subjects, like the Duke of Windsor, are let off lightly. Sir Roger Casement, executed for treason, was judged ‘honest and ...”

“... than I, such as Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, have admired these books; and Wystan Auden and Leonard Woolf are said to have spoken well of them. Certainly he saw himself as the heir to Virginia Woolf and his novels were written for those who enjoy the long conundrums of Joyce. But after four volumes no publisher ...”

“... him by his Bloomsbury acquaintances and chums, both old and young. ‘When I first saw Desmond,’ Leonard Woolf later recalled, ‘he looked like a superb young eagle who with one sweep of his great wing could soar to any height he chose ... Why did he never fulfil his promise? Why did the splendid eagle degenerate into an affable hawk?’ This was a ...”

“... saw a decisive break with the values of the Victorian era, the assumption expressed in Virginia Woolf’s celebrated hyperbole that ‘in or about December 1910, human character changed’. Those intellectuals whom we still find it convenient to refer to as ‘Bloomsbury’ may have paraded their revolt against Victorian parents and grandparents, and ...”

“... from a long habit of elegance. She knew that herself. ‘I can’t say it yet,’ she wrote to Leonard Woolf after Beginning Again came out. ‘Already I am writing like a printed book, and falsifying my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after ...”

“... Sciences and Humanities shows that his 25 books have not survived. Yet he was a man of many gifts. Leonard Woolf, who knew what Keynes and Russell could do, recalled a meeting of Labour sympathisers with Gandhi in London, where he had been bowled over by ‘one of the most brilliant intellectual pyrotechnic displays I have ever listened to’: Harold ...”

“... to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far wrong, either. What even Victorians regarded as Victoriana ...”

“... by his own fantasies. ‘You are quite wrong about Laurens van der Post,’ his publisher, Leonard Woolf, wrote to a friend in 1957. ‘He is not bogus, he is one of the sincerest of men. Some of what he writes is very good and some of it, in my opinion, unmitigated nonsense. But he believes it just as Christ and Freud did ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ wasn’t sure what she felt when she heard that Katherine Mansfield was dead. The cook, ‘in her sensational way’, had broken the news to her at breakfast: ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day ...”

“... he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his and their lives, under a series ...”

“... might be prone to cause them any displeasing impression.’ And much more in that vein. Virginia Woolf, all the same, picked up some displeasing impressions about the future of this man whose mind she liked. Mirsky was trap-mouthed: opened and bit his remark to pieces: has yellow misplaced teeth: wrinkles in his forehead: despair, suffering, very marked in ...”

“... feathers from China. Everyone waited to see if he’d give in to his mother’s wishes. Virginia Woolf, Julian’s aunt, wrote that he was ‘dog obstinate’, ‘his mouth and face much tenser, as if he had been thinking in solitude’. One evening, according to his younger brother, Quentin,there was a meal at Charleston eaten by Vanessa, we three children ...”

“... especially mistresses, is the theme of Alison Light’s study of the home life of Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship with her own cook, Nellie Boxall, involved a degree of intimidation on both sides. The sight of Virginia and Leonard pacing the squares of Bloomsbury, well out of earshot, anxiously ...”

“... woman writer of modern times who is universally referred to simply by her surname, tout court. Woolf hasn’t made it, even after all these years; Rhys without the Jean is incognito; Nin without the Anais looks like a typo. Colette, Madame Colette, remains, in this as much else, unique.Colette did not acquire this distinction because she terrorised respect ...”

“... first three volumes in the Observer and proclaiming it ‘without doubt a great book’. Leonard Woolf called its scope ‘magnificent’. J.L. Hammond hailed its publication as ‘a deeply significant event’. A cynical view of such judgments is that they came from friends, or at least from sympathetic liberal internationalists who warmed to ...”